The past few weeks of eclipse season has felt like a portal sucked me up and spit me out on another timeline, as eclipses tend to do. Somehow it’s only been a few weeks, but it feels like an entire year went by in that same span of time.
During the first (lunar) eclipse at the end of September, the release began for me as I watched How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, a new Thai film that will pull on your heart strings. Something that has been heavy on my mind in the past year has been my relationship to home and family, and this movie confronted my fears in a new way. I’ve been away from my home country for eight years, and before that I lived on the opposite side of said country, away from my family for four years before that. As I get older, and my family does, too, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing by staying so far away.
Where is the line between my own desires and closeness to family—or is closeness a newly found desire? Is it a true desire or is it rooted in fear?
After opening the taps (aka the tear ducts), I found myself grieving parts of a romantic relationship I thought was long done and gone, but this relationship ended during similar eclipses back in 2016, and it made sense why it was suddenly rushing in again.
The relationship ending was the catalyst for me leaving the country eight years ago. I had given up everything I thought I had been building towards—the career, the home, the family, my possessions, and the happily ever after—as I boarded a plane on a one way ticket to Australia.
I realised the grief is not entirely about the guy (which is news to me), but rather about the concept of home and family, and what I believe those things to be. A big part of my grief around this relationship ending is how deeply I felt for his family, feeling as though they were part of my own.
Home is something I’ve tussled with for my whole life, from childhood, leaving the home of a not-so-happy family when my parents divorced, finding refuge in temporary homes until finding one more permanent, moving to a new home as a teen just to move back into an old one, leaving home as soon as I could at eighteen years old, and leaving the country in search of my own home at age twenty-four.
The Impermanence of Life
Since watching the Thai movie weeks ago, I’ve been reflecting on the impermanence of life—especially with family members (and myself) getting older—while being so far away. Coincidentally, just over a week ago, I got word of my own grandmother’s passing; it’s hard news to hear when you’re on the opposite side of the globe. Without giving away the plot of the movie for anyone wanting to watch, I'll just say the feelings that came up when I watched it became permanently real in my own personal life, and I'll never get the opportunity to spend another moment with my nanny, who I would've loved to get to know more now that I'm older.
I previously wrote about the pain of living abroad (spoiler alert: it’s not all sunshine and rainbows—life still goes on), but I haven’t experienced a permanent loss like this in the time I’ve been away. It puts things into perspective, as this eclipse season pulls the strings of my roots and family lineage—essentially my sense of home (the 4th house).
Just in the past month I’ve been thinking about nanny a lot and where she came from. She immigrated to Canada from the Netherlands, something I’ve recently become more curious about, as I’ve never been there myself. I found myself searching iTalki for a Dutch tutor and looked up visa options for spending time in her homeland. I'm now aged out of the working holiday visa requirements, which seems like some sick metaphor for the fact that it's also now too late to get to know her, from her own perspective. We’ve not been close throughout my life, mostly because of religious differences that I didn’t understand when I was young, family dynamics that were challenging, and living in different provinces, but I do wish I could’ve sat down with her one last time.
Nanny is the first person in my life who wrote to me. She would send me cards that when you open them, they would come alive in front of your eyes. The bright colours and cutouts of flowers that would become 3D when the card was opened felt so magical when I was young, and they probably still would today. I remember wondering where she found cards so cool, because I’ve never seen anything like them. I learned the value of the written word from her before I even made it to my first years of school. I can still see her graceful cursive curving and taking shape around the flowers popping off the page. The feeling of opening her letters and cards is one that lives deep within me—she made me feel special—her words made me feel special. She taught me that words are a bridge of connection, even through religious differences, language barriers, and physical distance.
I don’t remember when the letters stopped, but that’s usually how it goes, isn’t it? We get busy, our priorities shift and change, and we lose touch with those we take for granted, until it's too late.
Connection and Relationships
All of my life I chose solitude as a safety mechanism. If I was alone, nobody could hurt me. If I kept my distance, I would be safe. Kids are to be seen and not heard, but I learned not to even be seen, because maybe that means I will be even more safe.
I think that’s why I knew I would be leaving my hometown since I was in junior high. I couldn’t wait to leave the small town bubble to see what else was out there. I’ve done so many scary things like skydiving, driving solo and camping across the Nullarbor Plain, living in a foreign country for almost a decade, travelling as a solo woman, getting sober—but when I look back, those were the easy things.
The hardest things for me were (and still are) when there were other people involved—when I chose to open my heart and be seen, be heard, and claim my space in the world. Trusting another human being with my heart sometimes feels too risky—that’s where the work is for me.
This eclipse season has me focused on the importance of all types of relationships and how we keep the connections alive, invite them in, or choose to let them go. As someone who has crossed the globe to find home in a place (with no luck finding the physical place, yet), I subscribed to the idea that home is a place we find within ourselves—a comfort in being who we are, wherever we are. But as I (and those around me) continue to grow older and leave this earth, I’m realising that home may just be where the people you love are. The more I think about it, maybe the reason I can’t find home in one physical place is because I have a little bit of home sprinkled all over the map.
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